Integrated Control and Real-Time Scheduling

Abstract: The topic of the thesis is codesign of flexible real-time control systems. Integrating control theory and real-time scheduling theory, it is possible to achieve higher resource utilization and better control performance. The integration requires new tools for analysis, design, and implementation. The problem of scheduling the individual parts of a control algorithm is studied. It is shown how subtask scheduling can reduce the input-output latency in a set of control tasks. Deadline assignment under different scheduling policies is considered. A feedback scheduling architecture for control tasks is introduced. The scheduler uses feedback from execution-time measurements and feedforward from workload changes to adjust the sampling periods of a set of control tasks so that the combined performance of the controllers is optimized. The Control Server, a novel computational model for real-time control tasks, is presented. The model combines time-triggered I/O with dynamic, reservation-based task scheduling. The model provides short input-output latencies and minimal jitter for the controllers. It also allows control tasks to be treated as scalable real-time components with predictable performance. Two MATLAB-based toolboxes for analysis and simulation of real-time control systems have been developed. The Jitterbug toolbox evaluates a quadratic cost function for a linear control system with timing variations. The tool makes it possible to investigate the impact of delay, jitter, lost samples, etc., on control performance. The TrueTime toolbox facilitates detailed cosimulation of distributed real-time control systems. The scheduling and execution of control tasks is simulated in parallel with the network communication and the continuous process dynamics.